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There are few things that can change the course of history faster than a nuclear bomb exploding.
The devastation is immediate and lasts for years.

That makes the latest details to emerge about a Jan. 24, 1961, incident involving two nuclear
bombs all the more jarring.

A B-52 bomber broke up in the sky over North Carolina, and one of two bombs on board was in the “
armed” setting when it hit the ground near Goldsboro, N.C., according to a declassified report
published on Monday by the National Security Archive. If the switch had not been damaged by the
impact, the weapon could have detonated, the report said.

The so-called Goldsboro incident received attention in the fall, when details were published in
a book,
Command and Control, by Eric Schlosser. And it sounds just as ominous as described on
Monday by Bill Burr of the archives.

“The report implied that because Weapon 2 landed in a free-fall, without the parachute
operating, the timer did not initiate the bomb’s high voltage battery (‘trajectory arming’), a step
in the arming sequence,” Burr wrote. “For Weapon 2, the Arm/Safe switch was in the ‘safe’ position,
yet it was virtually armed because the impact shock had rotated the indicator drum to the ‘armed’
position. But the shock also damaged the switch contacts, which had to be intact for the weapon to
detonate.”

Burr concluded:

“Perhaps this is what Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had in mind, a few years later, when
he observed that, ‘by the slightest margin of chance, literally the failure of two wires to cross,
a nuclear explosion was averted.’ ”

Three Air Force personnel in the B-52 died after the plane broke up that day.